


indiana jones has nothing on me

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: Angels & Demons (2009), Inferno - Fandom, The Da Vinci Code - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 11:15:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8530906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: Her first book isn't The Symbology of Secret Sects, though it's the first with any public apreciation. The first book she publishes is 300 words of The Mysteries of Holy Women, and puts in question female representation in art, chronologically, since Bathsheba to Queen Victoria. It takes a dozen years after for her to be squarely in the public eye and for the book to return to print. This time it goes on with six more editions.  Never let it be said Langdon did not wield her fame with skill.





	

 

 

People try to use her knowledge more than if she were a man. It's a fact. 

She's better at catching up on that, rebelling, refiusing, because she has to be. That is also a fact. 

 

\--

 

She reads Nancy Drew and Tolkien, Stevenson and Bradbury, Kant and Milton and history, all the thick history books girls weren't supposed to read. She read Sherlock Holmes and perfects the deduction method, annotations in the sides of worn pages, jounals full of puzzles conquered and riddles understood.

The more the world tells her she shouldn't care about dead mysteries the more she wants to know them. Why would you care about silly old scribbles, they ask her, and she says, I don't think they're silly at all. I think they are brilliant. One day I'm going to know all the secrets.

They laugh. She doesn't.

 

\--

 

Rebecca never forgets anything. Eidetic memory, elephant's memory, eternal recall. She's lucky except in all the ways she isn't.

It's so much harder to forgive when you can't forget. So much more dangerous to forget when there's so much more to forgive.

 

  
\--

Her first book isn't The Symbology of Secret Sects, though it's the first with any public apreciation and she's particularly proud of the alliteration on the title. The first book she publishes is 300 words of _The Mysteries of Holy Women_ , and puts in question female representation in art, chronologically, since Bathsheba to Queen Victoria.

It takes a dozen years after for her to be squarely in the public eye and for the book to return to print. This time it goes on with six more editions.

Never let it be said Langdon did not wield her fame with skill.

 

\--

Rebecca Langdon, her name displayed on book covers, book covers displayed on bookstore windows, like flowers, ancient devotions. Rebecca Langdon, the scholar, the sardonic genius, the insidious feminist. People lining up outside for her to sign their books.

Professor Langdon, her students say, hands raised, voices lilting, discussion and arguments, theories, lightening of the mind fast. Professor, they call in the halls, I have a question, do you have the time? She always has the time and tries to have the answers. She so does love having the answers.

Langdon. Stamp-fulls of passport visas, small eyes, hands that touched relics with awe, with ease. A mind that hounded and hunted and hoarded knowledge, a sponge, a safe, a dragon's glittering cavern of ancient gold. The unhailed hero, never humble: Indiana Jones without the hat and the whip, just a kid from Exeter with piggy eyes and an awkward smile, long hands good for prying secrets apart.

Rebecca, her girlfriends say, Katherine and Elizabeth, the others, beautiful and bold and brilliant, brilliant. Rebecca they call her, after Professor and Langdon are used up and shed. What they mean to say is, you with the mickey mouse watch, you of the fast words, the long silences, the tweed, the defiant arrogance, you yes you. There is an error of communication in the way people say names. What they refer to is the idea they create of the person attached to the name. The reality itself is an untouchable unknowable thing, the true name beyond the name. Plato's truths, suns with pale shadows.

She is Becca for some, most of them dead. There are always special names for dead things. Her true love goes to those names, and those dead things. There was a reason she was the best at her field of study, the best known, the mother. Simbology is not semiotics, is not iconology, mythology, or compared mythologies; it is what Rebecca glued together from her interests and the past, the unveiling of it.

She is a pioneer. Let them write that down in her wiki page, her grave: Rebecca Langdon, born 22th of June, 1966, woman, pioneer.

 

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://searchingforserendipity25.tumblr.com).


End file.
